Blackout was
manufactured by Williams in October of 1980. It marked the start
of a busy 4 months for Williams, with the releases of Scorpion, Algar, Alien
Poker, Black Knight and Jungle Lord all following shortly. It was
easy to see how Blackout got lost in the shuffle! It continued the
space theme started earlier in the year with the original
Firepower. 7,050 Blackouts were produced.

Although released
after Firepower, Blackout had an internal Williams game number two lower
than Firepower, used an earlier speech ROM and had no multi-ball
(although it did feature lane-change). This leads me to believe
Blackout was held back due the enormous popularity of Firepower
(rightfully deserved!).

Blackout was
designed by Claude Fernandez (his only Williams design credit), who went
on to design Flash Gordon, Spectrum, Elektra and others for Bally.

The art was by
Constantino Mitchell, who also did the art on Firepower, which is why
these two games seem very similar.

Game
History

(August 2001) - I've had been
looking for a Blackout for about a year. Nothing local on Ebay,
nothing in Mr. Pinball and nothing at the shows or auctions. I
decided to put a "game wanted" ad onto Mr. Pinball to see
what would happen. I received a couple of responses from upstate
New York and New England, all in the $800 to $1,000 range! I'm
in the market for a game that needs some help (that's what I enjoy
about the hobby), so I said thank you but no thank you. The ad
expired and I decided to try again. This time I received a
response from a guy out on Long Island who collected 70s Gottlieb EMs,
but had bough a Blackout as part of a package deal and had it in
storage. He didn't know if it worked or not, but thought it was
in decent condition and was asking $350. Since I had no luck
over the past 18 months, I made the trek out to Nassau County to get
the game.

One of more
interesting aspects of collecting pinball machines is actually buying
them. The seller of this machine (Joe I think), said to meet him
at a gas station and we would drive to the rented garage where the
machine was located. He said that he was in an old Jeep and we
should follow him when he showed up. There was another van close
to the description I gave him at the station also. I saw him
come up to the station, but then the other van left and he followed
it! We sat there for about five minutes or so (he had only given
me his home number, not a cell number) until he returned, with an embarrassed
look on his face. I can imagine what he thought when the other
Van stopped following him!

The game was
indeed in storage in a rented garage (he had a wonderful '65 Stingray
in the garage also!) and he muscled it out for us. The condition
was "OK", but it didn't seem to be missing any parts and the
backglass looked better than I had expected. We sealed the deal
and as usual when I drive out to Long Island, it took us 4 hours to
get back home!

Game
Restoration

I started the
restoration with the first issue to be tackled the playfield wear:

At first glance, the
wear doesn't seem to be too bad, however notice that there is Mylar
over the wear spots by the slingshots.

I used freeze spray
to remove the Mylar, and much to my surprise (or horror!), the paint
came off as well as the Mylar!

Moral of this story,
don't use freeze-spray on Mylar that's been applied over an already
damaged area.

I did make an attempt
to repaint the wear and area damaged by the Mylar removal attempt (see
above photo), but the results were disappointing (no doubt my absolute
lack of any artistic talent was a contributing factor <g>!) and
I decided to scrap the restoration attempt on this playfield.

Update March 2004 -
This project has been on the back burner for almost two years
now. I have in the past two years been able to obtain a
replacement playfield that is much better shape. Maybe
this will be year? Stay tuned!